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Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into witty, inventive and regularly emotional theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and emotion seamlessly merge in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he often discussed in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on money, matrimony, morals, status, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed insane and confined in a cell with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a